Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

In addition to pig & bear's new targets, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey's horror adaptation brings back a few familiar Hundred Acre Woods characters.

The Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey cast member also appeared in The Curse of Humpty Dumpty and Toothfairy 5. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s pig character](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-blood-honey-characters-confirmed/) in a pool. Massey has been seen in other horror movies such as Bunny the Killer Thing and The Killing Tree. Myers also appeared in the horror movies Vampire Virus, The Candy Witch, and Scarecrow's Revenge. In Blood and Honey](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-horror-movie-peter-pan-perfect-change-miss/), Pooh has grown homicidal and feral after being abandoned by young Christopher Robin. One of Maria’s college friends who visits the Hundred Acre Woods in the 2023 horror movie. Maria’s spectacled friend who is terrorized by Pooh in the gruesome slasher flick. The beloved children’s character is played by Nikolai Leon, whose only acting credit before Blood and Honey was in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s The Killing Tree. Piglet and Pooh take down any human who comes across their path in the Hundred Acre Woods in Blood & Honey’s terrifying adaptation. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s horror twist](https://screenrant.com/winnie-pooh-blood-honey-movie-not-disney-rights-explained/), but only Pooh Bear, Piglet, and Christopher Robin appear as main figures. The man inside Pooh Bear’s suit is Craig David Dowsett, whose only other acting credits are Sargent in The Area 51 Incident and Roger the Zombie Easter Bunny in the 2023 movie The House That Zombies Built. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s horrifying adaptation of the beloved children’s story features Craig David Dowsett playing Pooh Bear.

When the first stills from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey landed online in May of last year, the co-production from prolific genre film producers Jagged ...

There are bits intended to be funny and intended to be a bit campy. Hopefully, if it’s successful, and it does well, then we could do more and we will have the potential to do those sort of routes in the future. It’s got a dramatic undertone to it and it’s very serious. Even though there’s a lot of interest out there, we need to make sure everyone’s aware, February 15th is the day to go and see it in your cinema. The film is made for horror fans, so I’m hoping they’re the audience which are going to enjoy it the most. They’ve got the trailer playing before a lot of films in the cinema like M3GAN, Knock at the Cabin, things like that, to try and draw in those sorts of audiences. Over the years, people have altered and removed the darkness out of it, and brought it into more of a child-friendly version. as it has in Mexico and the rest of the world. They love Winnie-the-Pooh and horror, so they took it and agreed to do a full theatrical release in South and Central, then North America did initially a one day event, but now they’ve expanded it to a nine day event. I’m part of Jagged Edge—we were the filmmakers—so it’s our responsibility to say, ‘We think we should do this idea. There’s a lot of goodwill for the film. A frenzy of media coverage followed for the indie-budget viral sensation, which sets a feral Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet out on a bloody rampage.

A.A. Milne's entry into the public domain is commemorated by Rhys Frake-Waterfield's 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,' an inept horror pseudo-spoof.

This backstory is accompanied by some very simple line-drawing animation, which is underwhelming but turns out to be the best thing “Blood and Honey” has to offer. If the sound mix is often poor enough to bury dialogue in music, that may be to the dialogue’s benefit. Indeed, a narrator starts off explaining that young Christopher Robin befriended a group of “crossbreeds, abominations” (as opposed to nursery toys) as a wee lad, keeping them tame and well-fed from the family larder. The first (and, let’s hope, worst) consequence of that development is “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a rock-bottom joint that fails to meet even the most basic expectations set up by its conceptual gimmick. The characters and gentle whimsy of Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood are so familiar to multiple generations that one might forget it all springs from just two books, “Winnie-the-Pooh” (1926) and “The House at Pooh Corner” (1928), plus some poems. This movie could just as well be called “Michael Myers-Type Unstoppable Killing Machine And His More Texas Chainsaw-ish Pal Run Amok.” The only reason we associate it with Milne’s universe is because the film keeps verbally telling us to do so.

Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield takes us inside how he came up with (and got away with) Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. He also hints at where he wants to ...

The director already plans to take in “all the feedback and critique” to make his next movies even more effective. For the time being, the director intends to keep following the route of nasty fairytale creatures, and getting a bigger budget to help him do it. “He’s a completely different type of character.” To be sure, the director and his team did occasionally double-check to make sure they were drawing solely from the 1926 book. [Terrifier 2](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/how-terrifier-2-became-a-gory-cinderella-story/) was a box office hit, which apparently spelled good news for Blood and Honey. Despite working from a budget of less than $100,000, Blood and Honey has made the fast-track from direct-to-streaming to wide theatrical release. The Walt Disney Company still owns the rights to their depiction of Pooh Bear, including the now iconic image of the cuddly fellow in a red shirt sans pants (hence Blood and Honey’s fully clothed Pooh). “My Pooh is a massively different type of character,” Frake-Waterfield explains. However, the character himself was created in 1926 in the children’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh, which is in the public domain as of Jan. Fueled with a hatred of all things human, the duo go on a murder spree that terrorizes a group of teens (played by Maria Taylor, Natasha Rose Mills, Amber Doig-Thorne, among others) who foolishly decide to party and the Wood. The answer comes down to a quirk of copyright law. The movie stars Craig David Dowsett and Chris Cordell as Pooh and Piglet, who are now all grown up and bent on revenge against Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) after he left them to starve in the Hundred Acre Wood. “I think everybody does.” Indeed, most people would agree with that statement about the guileless toy bear who embarked on imaginary adventures with his fellow plush animals and human pal Christopher Robin.

The goal of “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” was clearly to ruin your childhood. The bizarrely uninspired horror disaster will make you wish you kept your ...

Most of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey concerns Pooh and Piglet hunting a group of women who are on a weekend getaway at a remote cabin because Maria (Maria Taylor) has been persistently menaced by a creep. Undoubtedly, their wooden gait and stiff movements are a byproduct of trying to avoid having their headgear fall off, but that doesn’t change the fact that their oh-so-slow pursuits of their targets are intensely ludicrous. Barely able to open and close their mouths, and wholly incapable of moving expressively, Pooh and Piglet look idiotic, especially since Pooh’s orange visage is frozen in a goofy grin. The ensuing trauma was so severe that it drove Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and his loyal minion Piglet (Chris Cordell) mad, warping their minds and convincing them to reject their human instincts, including speech. Christopher is appalled that Pooh and Piglet are now wannabe Jason Voorhees, but that’s not the only strange thing about the pair. Such absurdity is emblematic of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, as Frake-Waterfield’s script boasts neither general nor internal logic. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s central gimmick](https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/winnie-the-pooh-horror-movie-blood-and-honey-will-ruin-your-childhood) is that it features author [A.A. Christopher, meanwhile, is abducted by Pooh, this after he screams and wails like a baby about what’s become of his soft-and-cuddly friends. Robin, who, five years later, shows up in Hundred Acre Wood with his wife, Mary (Paula Coiz), eager to introduce her to his old magical buddies. What he does do is bludgeon, stab, and stalk his prey like a monster, which is crushingly juvenile and groan-worthy. Those who are intrigued by such a gory reimagining, on the other hand, can look forward to some of the chintziest and most uninspired exploitation cinema [this side of Sharknado](https://www.thedailybeast.com/sharknado-4-the-monster-returns-for-more-bottom-of-the-barrel-idiocy). Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, which is now in theaters, only exists because Milne’s original 1926 book, Winnie-the-Pooh, entered the public domain last year.

After a whirlwind press tour, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has entered cinemas for an incredibly limited theatrical run. Now that fans have had a chance ...

If I was a critic it’s a 3/10 but I’m not it’s a 20/10 [pic.twitter.com/mwG1I02OBM] [February 16, 2023] Did you go to one of the Blood and Honey showings? I will say some of the lighting and framing choices were great.— Matthew (@mattbo_0) Absolutely worth the price of admission. "We have been overwhelmed with the enthusiastic response from the public," executive producer Stuart Alson previously said in a statement regarding the film's press cycle. Surprising most, it seems the early reactions are generally positive with some even hoping to see the project turn into a franchise.

New horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was made possible after the beloved bear passed into the public domain. Mickey Mouse, Batman and Superman ...

Countless cherished characters have passed into public domain before, but perhaps never so abruptly and savagely as Pooh. Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Owl, Eeyore ...

To her, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” may not be the most glorious example of the effects of public domain, but it’s part of a process that human creativity depends upon and thrives on. “Blood and Honey” may not make a lasting mark in the Hundred Acre Woods, but something, someday will. 1 column for “Public Domain Day.”](https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/) But nothing has caused her phone to ring off the hook quite like “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Time will tell with this movie or any other reuse of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet whether movies like this will be rewarded in the marketplace or have any enduring appeal. “The fact that some people may be disturbed or revolted by this particular re-use of some of the characters from Winnie the Pooh doesn’t detract from the value of the public domain,” says Jenkins. [a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain,](https://law.duke.edu/fac/jenkins/) is used to operating in a relatively quiet and byzantine realm of copyright law and thorny rights issues. “When Superman and Batman fall into the public domain, there’s going to be some wild films, I’m sure of it,” says “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” writer, director and co-producer Rhys Waterfield. Though made for less than $100,000, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” will open Friday on some 1,500 screens in North America, an unusually wide release for such a little-funded movie. “Aladdin” comes from the folk tale collection “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.” [“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud-FBr74K8o) a new microbudget R-rated horror film, Pooh wades into far darker territory than even Eeyore could have ever imagined. Pop culture, as a concept, was born in the 1920s, meaning many of the most indelible — and still very culturally present — works will fall into public domain in the coming years. Tigger, who debuted in 1928’s “The House at Pooh Corner,” isn’t public until 2024.

As a horror and a comedy, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has no rhythm with either, and it's too dim to be worthy of a curious look.

By being finished and distributed, "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" will already be a win for some (and a sequel has been announced). "Blood and Honey" then lumps her in with other easy targets for easier shocks: the women are as gullible as anyone deeply offended by this movie, and we're meant to laugh at each poor choice these characters make. A sentence I never thought I'd write: Pooh and Piglet proceed to terrorize these women, with a few other victims thrown in, sometimes in a way akin to ritual sacrifice. Take away the Pooh and Piglet stuff, and you have a ho-hum stalker thriller that treats its one-dimensional characters as punchlines for gory scenes its budget can't fully deliver on. The best joke is that you see Pooh's round ears and button-nose in ominous shots where Leatherface or Michael Myers are supposed to be, with red overalls and a rubbery mask that's frozen to a type of honey-suckling grin. This English production, making its way to 1,500 theaters in America this week, aims to take the piss out of one's childhood nostalgia, which is mirrored here by what happens to poor Christopher Robin (

Sometimes when a beloved property ends up in the public domain, you might hear people joke about how now anyone can make a film about that story, ...

It’s almost like Frake-Waterfield isn't attempting to film while running, it’s as if he’s just decided to run alongside Pooh, and who cares what footage is captured in the process? Christopher is taken and held hostage, while Pooh and Piglet set their sights on Maria (Maria Taylor) and her friends, who rent a cottage in the woods to help Maria get over a recent stalking incident. While she doesn't believe Christopher’s childhood tales, she soon does, when the pair are attacked by Pooh Bear (Craig David Dowsett) and Mary is choked to death by Piglet (Chris Cordell). Writer-director (using those terms loosely) Rhys Frake-Waterfield decided to take an idea that could fit within a tweet, and turned it into Blood and Honey, a film that overstays its welcome before the opening credits. [Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey](https://collider.com/where-to-watch-winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey/), a horror take on the adored children's stories. Yet when Christopher left for college, well, things got dark, and the animals didn’t know how to survive without their human companion.

In two sentences, Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) manages to silence anyone who complains that we don't produce iconic movie quotes anymore while pretty much ...

Reasonable people can disagree about his use of the term “a lot,” but there’s definitely fun to be had. But regardless of how things play out politically, it’s highly amusing that something as deliberately imbecilic as “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” is destined to become a major event in public domain history. “We spent a lot of time working on it but not a lot of time shooting it. Don’t say you weren’t warned.) The trade-off is that the script makes an enormous amount of what can charitably be described as “narrative compromises” to make all of the violence fit into a world that feels remotely coherent. “Blood and Honey” feels like a throwback to a simpler era of filmmaking. In the same way old women-in-prison movies would blatantly advertise a nude shower scene and knockoff slasher flicks would list the types of dismemberment that they showed on their posters, “Blood and Honey” makes no attempt to hide its simple value proposition.

What do Santa, Pinocchio, and The Grinch have in common? They've all been made into horror monsters.

But for that to be true, the doll would have to magically come to life or something! It really makes you wonder whether all the bad things going on are the work of main character Wendy or the incredibly terrifying doll of Humpty Dumpty that seems to be haunted. Something changed in the 1980s and clowns went from figures of love and merriment to malicious monsters in the popular mind. In it, a puppet named Pinocchio is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer—or is it?? Here, Santa is all-too-real, unlocked from a primordial ice casket like the monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing. As expected, he puts on a red suit and goes nuts and kills everyone, but it’s the way he goes nuts and kills everyone that make it a great holiday movie. But the best of all these movies, without a doubt, is Christmas Evil. The movie’s writer, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the director of Blood and Honey, describes the movie like this to [Dread Central](https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/442311/bambi-becomes-a-vicious-killing-machine-in-new-childhood-ruining-horror-reimagining-exclusive/): “The film will be an incredibly dark retelling of the 1928 story we all know and love. It’s not a very good movie, but The Banana Splits was not a good show. So the main character here is called “The Mean One” and looks grinch-y, but isn’t fully the Grinch. Forced to fend for themselves, Pooh and Piglet turn feral and develop a taste for blood. I’m sure the estate of Winnie the Pooh creator A.A.

The controversial new Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie 'Blood and Honey' is the product of the original Pooh story entering the public domain.

[Rotten Tomatoes score](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/winnie_the_pooh_blood_and_honey) currently sitting at 8%. [Disney](https://time.com/5790677/bob-iger-successor-predictions-chapek-failures/) still owns the rights to the animated cartoon versions of Pooh Bear and company, A.A. [reportedly made for under $100,000](https://variety.com/2023/film/global/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-box-office-micro-budget-1235515255/), has also garnered a significant amount of online attention and already [earned $1 million in Mexico](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/winnie-the-pooh-blood-honey-mexico-box-office-1235318616/) since its Jan. For instance, the Pooh of Blood and Honey is wearing a red flannel button-up rather than the red t-shirt of Disney Pooh fame, and popular characters like Tigger don’t appear in the film. “The bizarrely uninspired horror disaster will make you wish you kept your money instead.” “We knew there was this line between that, and we knew what their copyright was and what they’ve done. So we did as much as we could to make sure [the film] was only based on the 1926 version of it.” Five years later, Christopher Robin returns to the woods with his wife Mary (Paula Coiz) in hopes of introducing her to his childhood friends and proving they weren’t imaginary. Shepard’s drawings of Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, Owl, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin, all became fair game for any and all types of adaptations following the end of the 95-year copyright protection term. The Pooh and Piglet of Blood and Honey are a far cry from the beloved characters created by English author A.A. Forced to fend for themselves, the creatures of the Hundred Acre Wood begin eating each other (R.I.P. “I’ve had death threats.

The viral horror movie based on A.A. Milne's characters — and carefully working around Disney's copyright — turns Pooh and Piglet into gruesome, ...

But Blood and Honey is so straight-faced and unrelievedly grim that the audience is inevitably being set up to laugh at it instead of with it. There’s no theme to Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, no bigger idea at work, and barely even a story. C’mon, the idea of figures as cuddly and bumbling as Pooh and Piglet turning into slaughter-monsters is inherently a bit hilarious. There’s no sense that the filmmakers behind Blood and Honey have ever read a Winnie-the-Pooh story, or have any idea what goes into one. So is the idea that kids’ fantasies have weight and meaning that outlasts childhood. Particularly during clunky moments like the one where a group of women find the words “GET OUT” scrawled in blood on the windows of their rental cabin. Frake-Waterfield leans hard into the “honey” part of Blood and Honey, with Pooh repeatedly taking breaks from the slaughter to cover his inexpressive face in dripping, sticky slime, which he sometimes drizzles over his victims as well. The acting is often stiff and the script is repetitive, but the cast uniformly pulls off screams of agony and terror convincingly as Pooh and Piglet are menacing, torturing, or killing them. The whole film has a distinctively raw “Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974” vibe, from Pooh’s woodsy cabin filled with antlers and bones to his Leatherface-style silent, bulky menace to the focus on the grotesque. Blood and Honey does have a few things going for it, for viewers in love with practical-effects gore and classic exploitation cinema. For people who are into horror less for storytelling tension or a sense of real threat, and more because they really enjoy watching gnarly levels of human suffering, Blood and Honey has plenty of that. (Disney’s copyright over its own version of Milne’s characters remains in effect.) In the horror-movie version, Pooh and his timid friend Piglet are all grown up and have become serial killers.

Thanks, public domain! Pooh and Piglet become horror villains in 'Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.' The 5 worst moments that'll ruin your childhood.

[the public domain](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/01/winnie-pooh-blood-and-honey-horror-movie/7961872001/), author A.A. [How can Winnie the Pooh be made a killer? And thank goodness Disney still owns the copyright to Tigger, introduced in 1928 – for now.) The porcine one is Pooh’s enforcer and hog-ties one of the vacationing women so Pooh can crush her head with a car (the old bear has given up the ways of man but still drives) and kills another by smacking his trusty sledgehammer into her face. Of course, they’re no match for the hard-to-kill Pooh with his machete and a squadron of bees. Chris runs away, Pooh repeatedly stabs her body and the movie suddenly ends, saving some nightmare fuel for the eventual sequel. Pooh puts a blade to Maria’s throat but Christopher begs for forgiveness and to let her go. He returned five years after leaving to introduce his new wife Mary (Paula Coiz) to the animal crew, but instead they were attacked. The public domain, explained](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/01/winnie-pooh-blood-and-honey-horror-movie/7961872001/) One of the group, Tina (May Kelly), gets lost trying to locate the place. 23](https://www.fathomevents.com/events/Winnie-the-Pooh-Blood-and-Honey)). (Owl and Rabbit are nowhere to be found after the opening, by the way. Things take a dark turn, though, when Christopher goes to college, starvation sets in during winter and Pooh, Piglet, Owl and Rabbit kill and eat their buddy Eeyore.